Does Breastfeeding Result in Smarter Kids?
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- Опубликовано: 3 авг 2023
- A recent study conducted in the United Kingdom claims that breastfeeding makes for smarter kids when they reach the ripe old age of 16. If I had to guess, I’d guess that you were thinking, “So what, don’t we already know that kids are smarter if they’re breastfed?”
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Nice application of Hank's Razor: "Anything that could possibly be influenced by socio-economic status, probably is."
Two of my kids were breastfed, one of them wasn't. They're still arguing about who is smarter.
Sounds like all of them aren't the brightest
As a mom who had the privilege to breastfead until 2 years I fully agree with this. Breast milk is not some miracle thing that prevents a bunch of stuff. Fed is best be it breast milk or formula as long as baby is getting the nutrients they need to grow.
I agree, except for one point.
We actually know the proper nutrients for growth.
Sure we THINK we know.. but the past suggests we are wrong about some of it.
Nature on the other hand, has a long track record of knowing nutrition better than humans.
Damm, it looks like I could've been a genius, but my mother bottle fed me 80s shitty formula. So now, I'm just bang on average...😢
It kind of is, though. Not to the extent where if you need to formula feed you should be shamed, but breastmilk DOES prevent a 'bunch of stuff', or at least lowers the risk.
Breastmilk continues to provide immunity until the immune system is properly developed, which isn't until around 7yo (which, funnily enough, is the top-end age of when children have been studied to fully self-wean). My 2.5yo has breastfed more frequently this week, and a day after he started doing so, he got his snotty nose - he knew ahead of time that he needed more nutrients!
If you let your child self-wean, they still get nutrients from breast milk until that point, which can top up what they may have missed out on in the food they ate. Popular belief is that they don't really get any nutrients from it once they're 1yo, but that's not actually true.
If you tandem feed, immunity the toddler is PASSED ON to the baby. So if toddler has licked a lamppost, baby benefits from immunity created by the breast as well as toddler.
Breastmilk has more melatonin at night time, more fat towards the end of the feeding session, and in summary is made up of exactly what the specific child needs.
Breastfeeding lowers mum's risk of breast cancer, ovarian cancer, osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease and obesity.
It helps reduce baby's risk of SIDS.
I'm all for formula feeding if you need to, but I think 'fed is best' AND 'breast is best' are true in equal measure, honestly. Formula is of course still sufficient and gives the essentials for development, but formula companies wouldn't ever be able to make it individualised based on what the child has been in contact with or eaten on any one given day. Formula is a lifeline for many and in many cases it therefore trumps breastmilk, but if you can just as easily do either, the choice is clear!
‘Fed’ is a necessity, breastmilk is best for baby. Breast is best. It's not mom shaming to say that. Feed your child however works best for your situation, but pretending formula (which is a medically acceptable alternative) is as good as breastmilk is just a lie. My 18 month old will currently only eat mac and cheese, but I know broccoli is better....
Babies being fed syrup is being ‘fed’ but in no way is it ‘best’ nor acceptable .
@@rachelgooden9981 broccoli & cheese or broccoli Mac casserole!
I have heard that breastfeeding is most important in poor countries. Because of the cost of formula they end up diluting it more than it is meant to be diluted and they are using suspect water sources. So in those cases, breastfeeding is definitely better.
At 0:44 the quoted piece from the study says they adjusted for socioeconomic factors, so why were socioeconomic factors given as the main counterpoint?
My first though was "That seems ripe for confounding factors if the study design isn't great", and lo and behold. To be fair that's pretty much my default assumption whenever I read anything about science in regular news at this point, though.
Why isn't it more horrifying that we try justifying breastfeeding by pointing to standardized test scores? The parent-child relationship is the most meaningful relationship a human can have, and breastfeeding is a time for the mother to have a deeping bonding experience with her baby. The fact we don't give time to parents to raise their children is horrifying. The fact we don't have better medical care for women so that they can better feed their children is an injustice. And yes, there are some parents who can't breastfeed their children because not all bodies are the same or because a same sex couple adopted a child, or because the parent is unable to produce milk for some reason, and in those cases we should do more research into ways to support those families, but it seems like the current research is trying to justify breastfeeding rather than understanding how best we can support families who can't do that.
In my region of the world, it is the opposite. Poor families more likely to breastfeed for longer. Formula is a luxury reserved for the rich!
They are just suckers of capitalism
20 seconds in and I immediately can't help wondering whether people who are more well-off financially or more likely to have the time to breastfeed and also have the money for better nutrition for their children growing up as well as better education and better schooling systems and so many other things that go into how one performance on standardized tests as a teenager
Didn't know you had a podcast! I often quote you and would really enjoy hearing more on podcasts. I'll look it up.
"Do the data support it?"
Data is the plural. Datum is singular. "Do they?" "Does he?"
This is a problem:
“If you have the time, resources, and inclination to breastfeed your children, that’s great! […] But if you don’t, that’s ok too. Your children will not be any worse off than anyone else’s when they suffer through standardized testing 16 years down the road.”
Whether breastfeeding is better than formula-feeding is irrelevant compared to the fact that not all women have the time and resources to breastfeed. A study that showed breastfed babies were *better off* than formula-fed ones would be better for all of us in the long run because it would force us to make sure all mothers are on paid maternity leave for 12 months and could return to their former work after. Whether they’d end up breastfeeding or not while on that maternity leave is unimportant. The benefits would be elsewhere and would be huge.
Unfortunately that's not necessarily better. Depending on the workplace and level of seniority a 12 month period of leave could have significant career impacts. It contributes to the infamous "baby gap" which is that women with children start to fall behind their male and childless female peers in pay and seniority. Formula feeding can help the father shoulder more of the caring responsibility, and take more of the leave, and therefore the mother spends less time on leave.
@@Croz89 You dropped a "in the USA"; If your exact same work position is waiting for you when you get back the fallout is less, plus mothers in my country are paid slightly more, get a few more days of paid leave and get to retire slightly earlier than their childless peers. You *can* control for this... if you want.
@@AnjaPraprotnik No, not just in the USA, pretty much everywhere. If you have a skilled job and you take a long career break for whatever reason, even if you come back to the exact same job, you are going to be significantly behind your colleagues both in experience and tenure. That means they are more likely to receive promotions and pay rises than you are, often because they're just simply better at their jobs thanks to that extra year of experience.
Sure, you could force through legislation to compensate for this, but that will piss a lot of people off.
Good info as always. I didn't know this was a thing that people said so this is all news to me.
Insightful and wonderful. Thanks!
It was the all-or-nothing attitude of the lactation consultants I interacted with that ended up causing the most harm for us. We could have avoided a very scary trip to the hospital if supplementing was more supported, but instead, I was given the impression that if the child got any formula, my milk would dry up and I would instantly be a breastfeeding failure. Can we normalize talking about it on the spectrum that it actually is? That it's possible to do both? And now I'll step off my soap box.
I always figured it had something to do with how much attention children received. Breastfeeding requires paying a bit more attention to a child than formula feeding. I’m not knocking anyone who formula feeds; there are plenty of conscientious formula parents who don’t let their attention slip through the cracks
Could you guys do an episode on puberty blockers?
They've at least touched on the broader topic around it and I think on puberty blockers more specifically. I'll do a quick search on their channel page and edit/ reply.
He won't. He does pop culture science review. He Can't risk polarizing the channel; Money > integrity
You finally attacked breastfeeding versus bottle feeding! I have been waiting for that and ended up doing my own research and came to same result! As an insomniac, bottle feeding was extremely helpful for me to get back to myself after two pregnancies.
I agree that this topic was a long time coming! In my experience, medical practitioners are extremely preachy about breastfeeding, but it's not any better than bottle feeding, except for rare cases. It all makes no sense!
I am hear because everything I read say that breastfeed babies are smart and more emotionally stable. I couldn’t breastfeed both of mine due to my medical conditions and being on medication on and off. It makes me so depressed.
Oh this comment section is gonna be good. 🍿🥤
Thank you for continuing to do this! It is so good to have things explained. I am interested in hearing about this swiss 1:35 heart injury from covid vax study.
Video brought to you by Nestle. On a serious note saying developed countries breastfeed more is such a gaslight. There's data that shows higher income western families breastfeed less because of time restrictions. advertising, and women want to go back to work sooner. The developing world can't be beat on breastfeeding prevalence because they often don't have a choice - formula is damn expensive.
Also IQ/test scores is very hard to study. But if I had to speculate if you account for socioeconomic status, breastfed babies might get less sick and fewer allergies leading to a healthier gut biome (and by extension neuro chemistry) and less school absences in the ages 0-5. After this age of rapid brain development the external factors (stress, nutrition, poverty) are too potent to compensate for. Redesign the test for ages 4-8. Age 16 is ridiculous. (also test the parents to control for IQ's very high genetic penetrance)
This is the problem with an academic system that only publishes positive results. It's really depressing and keeps pushing me away from academic medicine.
Most trials in medicine are negative trials. This is important because we do a lot of nonsense because of tradition, lobbying, pharmaceutical industry and bad doctors. This constitutes harm. Science progresses at a snails pace and good rigorous science takes patience, and time, and margins are small. If you're coming here looking for huge discoveries youre going to be solely disappointed and quit, or fake trial results for fame. (god knows we already have enough of the latter)
Fed is best. That's pretty much it. I breastfed because I could and it was cheaper. I'm happy I did, but if you can't or it makes you miserable, or it doesn't work with work, your kid will be just as healthy and smart as the same kid breastfed.
I'd really question the 'just as healthy' part of that, as it's generally known that breastfed kids on average have better immunity. It's fine to formula feed for all those other reasons you gave in and of themselves, not because it has 'essentially the same health benefits' as breastfeeding
‘Fed’ is not best. Breast is best. Formula is acceptable. Syrup being fed to babies is being ‘fed’ but it’s not best. Nor is it acceptable.
Fed is a necessity, breastmilk is best for baby. It's not mom shaming to say that. Feed your child however works best for your situation, but pretending formula is as good as breastmilk is just a lie. My 18 month old will currently only eat mac and cheese, but I know broccoli is better....
@@rachelgooden9981 ...but babies don't need syrup. or water, or yogurt, or any of the other foods we eat. They need breastmilk or formula. They aren't "fed" if they eat that other stuff, they're dead. And you are absolutely shaming women who can't breastfeed. None of the research presented here showed that formula was worse than breastfeeding, if you've got some good data to back up your claims, then by all means! Share with the rest of the world! But I've actually taken statistics classes, I've actually read research, so correlation just ain't gonna cut it for me.
@@febberz Generally known =/= medically proven. Any benefit to immunity from breastfeeding does not actually last past when the child is breastfeeding, and the level of protection a child gets is, as of now, completely unknown. If you have some really good empirical data, I'd love to see it, but from what I've seen this is more of "we think this is true" rather than "here is the data that points to this being true" kind of thing.
Personally, I think the difference between high quality, correctly concentrated formula mixed with clean safe water probably isn't that much different to breast milk in terms of benefits for an infant. Any advantages are pretty marginal, and that's the situation in the developed world. What is the problem is in countries where formula is of lower quality, is often diluted too much because it's expensive and where local water supplies are often contaminated. Whether you choose breast or formula in the developed world doesn't really matter, just go with whatever is most convenient and suitable for your lifestyle and your baby. But in the developing world we probably should still push breast over formula because of the issues of cost, dilution and contaminated water supplies.
But if the water is contaminated, the mother is still ingesting the contaminant and feeding it to the baby if they’re breastfeeding. The ultimate thing to tackle there is clean water.
@@redrumnoir7552 Sometimes, yes, but not every contaminant is expressed in breast milk. Having it pass through one mature immune system first at least reduces the risk to the baby somewhat.
Have you actually looked into it though? This is a bold statement to make if you haven't.
Breastmilk continues to provide immunity until the immune system is properly developed, which isn't until around 7yo (which, funnily enough, is the top-end age of when children have been studied to fully self-wean). My 2.5yo has breastfed more frequently this week, and a day after he started doing so, he got his snotty nose - he knew ahead of time that he needed more nutrients!
If you let your child self-wean, they still get nutrients from breast milk until that point, which can top up what they may have missed out on in the food they ate. Popular belief is that they don't really get any nutrients from it once they're 1yo, but that's not actually true.
If you tandem feed, immunity the toddler is PASSED ON to the baby. So if toddler has licked a lamppost, baby benefits from immunity created by the breast as well as toddler.
Breastmilk has more melatonin at night time, more fat towards the end of the feeding session, and in summary is made up of exactly what the specific child needs.
Breastfeeding lowers mum's risk of breast cancer, ovarian cancer, osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease and obesity.
It helps reduce baby's risk of SIDS.
I'm all for formula feeding if you need to, but I think 'fed is best' AND 'breast is best' are true in equal measure, honestly. Saying formula in developed countries is 'basically no different' is frankly slightly alarming, but of course it's still sufficient!
@@febberz I don't think in a relatively hygienic environment in the developed world that the immunity benefits (for which there isn't particularly strong evidence) are significant. Self weaning also demands much more of the mother which isn't practical for those who want to return to the workforce, it's not realistic for the vast majority.
The biggest problem I have is breastfeeding advocates preying on the natural paranoia of new mothers to make them afraid if they don't breastfeed their child even if it means significant personal sacrifice, it will have significant and permanent negative outcomes. And in the developed world, I think that's completely unfounded.
@@Croz89why do you say there isn't strong evidence to show that breastmilk increases immunity (in that it has the antibodies needed to fight illnesses as they occur)?
Last time i saw the figures, breast feeding was pretty uncommon in UK compared to some other western countries
Conflict of interest?
3:14 tldw
_BEWBS_